Category Archives: Article

Analysis, Asia

Asian Internationalism: Bandung’s Echo in a Colonial Metropolis

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Amrith, Sunil S. “Asian Internationalism: Bandung’s Echo in a Colonial Metropolis.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 6, no. 4 (December 2005): 557–69. doi:10.1080/14649370500316869.
ISSN: 14649373
Abstract:
This paper argues that two conflicting discourses of internationalism stood in uneasy counterpoint and contention in the Asian arena of the 1950s, reflected in the legacies of the Bandung conference. The first drew on a language of global citizenship and rights. The second saw the international system as a source of strength and support for state sovereignty, and state‐directed programmes of national development. The remainder of the paper uses the case of late‐colonial Singapore to examine the intersection of these two discourses of internationalism. An Asian internationalism, which spanned to include Africa over the course of the 1950s, became one of a stock of narratives that made Singapore’s ‘everyday cosmopolitanism’ possible, in the worlds of the hawkers, the dockworkers and the agriculturalists. The political aspirations of these groups were sacrificed, ultimately, to the goal of disciplined national development, supported by an international order that had closed in to defend the interests of state power.
Analysis, Human Rights

Who Are the Norm Makers? The Asian-African Conference in Bandung and the Evolution of Norms.

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Acharya, Amitav. “Who Are the Norm Makers? The Asian-African Conference in Bandung and the Evolution of Norms.” Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations 20, no. 3 (July 1, 2014): 405–17. doi:10.5555/1075-2846-20.3.405.
Abstract:
It is increasingly recognized that the literature on norms, like that of international relations more generally, neglects or obscures the voices and role of non-Western actors. Part of the reason has to do with its relatively narrow conceptualization of agency: who are the norm makers and how do they create and diffuse norms? This article, drawing on the author’s previous work on the subject, calls for a broader understanding of what norm making means and who should be considered as norm entrepreneurs. It then examines the debates and outcomes of the Asian-African Conference in Bandung in 1955 to illustrate some if not all of the key points about the normative agency of the developing countries in the construction of the postwar security order.